Previews

Velvet Assassin

A quick shot of morphine, rose petals and a woman in a nightgown are the keys to victory against the Third Reich in Replay Studios' stealth/action game.

Spiffy:

Great premise; interesting flashback structure; stealth kills.

Iffy:

Odd stealth mechanics; iffy controls.

Creative ideas are the seeds of great games. Unfortunately great games aren't built on great ideas alone. Execution actually counts for much more in making a quality product and, on balance, it's probably better to take a well-worn concept and do it to perfection than to do a mediocre job on a brilliant concept. Unfortunately that was the vibe given off by Replay Studios' and Gamecock's Velvet Assassin, a stealth/action game set in World War II about a female spy who sneaks behind German lines to cripple the Third Reich. Unfortunately this great concept is built around a stealth action/core that feels like a cruder version of the one Thief: The Dark Project pioneered back in 1998.

As far as original ideas, go, Velvet Assassin is a winner. Based loosely on the exploits of real-life secret agent Violette Szabo, the game is the story of Violette Summer, an average housewife who volunteers to become a spy after her husband is killed during World War II. Over the course of the game, gamers will follow Violette as she hits some of the most notorious hotspots of World War II including the docks at Hamburg and the Warsaw Ghetto in an effort to cripple the German war machine and bring the Nazis to their knees.

The game's basic gameplay seem to be built around classic stealth mechanics. When Violette is in shadow (and thus invisible) she is lined in bright purple highlights. This applies whether she's down in a dark sewer or merely in the shade of a fence or crawling through some thick weeds on a bright summer day, which does tend to break the immersion factor a bit. If she's bent over or crawling she's silent and has a variety of little tricks including whistling to distract enemy soldiers, putting them in position for a pretty impressive selection of pretty painful-looking stealth kills. While she does come equipped with a few weapons including a German Luger and some grenades and can pick up other weapons like a sniper rifle along the way, Violette is no action hero. A couple of smacks from the Germans and La Resistance has to get itself a new heroine.

The other major game mechanic is the game's morphine system. Using it puts her into a sort of psychotic fugue state that completely alters her perceptions. Suddenly time slows down, the world goes into soft focus and slows down while rose petals drift out of the sky and Violette runs around in a nightgown. It's actually rather beautiful and provides a nice contrast with the rest of the game's graphics, which are quite realistic and -- as in the case of an executed family lying in the streets of the Warsaw Ghetto -- often disturbing. In this state Violette is completely invulnerable and can kill any of the game's ordinary enemies. The conceit for this system is that the entire game is, in fact, a flashback. Violette is actually in a hospital bed in a coma reliving the events of her life that got her there.

The biggest problem we've seen so far is that the game's stealth/action elements don't seem terribly compelling nor that well-implemented. Never mind the bizarre idea that any shade at all makes Violette invisible, the guards that Violette must stalk and kill don't seem terribly bright. In one case, Violette snuck up and pulled a pin on a grenade on a guard's belt and a guard almost standing next to him apparently didn't find it worth investigating when his partner blew up. The controls seem awkward and there's a weird effect where the game blacks out and in to change Violette's animation model when she gets on or off a ladder. The game is still in development, of course, and hopefully the developers can clean it up before its October release date.